Justice League official "Zack Snyder" cut on HBO Max

Discussion in 'Science Fiction & Fantasy' started by Ar-Pharazon, May 20, 2020.

  1. Skipper

    Skipper Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    I'm a little tired of the entire "embarrassed by superheroes" concept too. I really don't believe it's a thing, otherwise every writer who writes more "adult" superhero comics would be "embarrassed".

    And usually, I think that if someone was really "embarrassed" by superheroes, s/he simply wouldn't make a movie about them. Yes, one can argue that they could make one just for the money, but a this point the studios could simply choose someone with the same tag price and that is at least a little bit invested in the project.
     
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  2. fireproof78

    fireproof78 Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Yeah, sorry, I will forever struggle with this concept. This isn't like a family relative who spouts off inappropriate things. This is taking a concept of a character and reinterpreting it in a different way. In other words, it is taking the original Robin Hood story, where the hero dies at the end, and makes it a cute fun story about a friendly fox who fought a lion.
     
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  3. thribs

    thribs Vice Admiral Admiral

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    I recommend coming to the UK. The Ultimate edition is a 12 here.
    Seems like no one in the Colonies has it yet. I was curious about it but I have seensome scenes on YouTube on how it will be presented now.
     
  4. crookeddy

    crookeddy Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    It certainly isn't a HARD-R movie... It's not filled with profanity, sex, and blood.
     
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  5. Skipper

    Skipper Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    And everyone knows that often MPA ratings don't make any sense.

    There is the famous example of Bully who was rated R in the US and PG in Canada.
     
  6. fireproof78

    fireproof78 Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    "The King's Speech" got an R rating in the US. Let's not put too much stock in to that rating...
     
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  7. Skipper

    Skipper Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    The comedy G.B.F. doesn't contain any "F-bomb, hint of nudity or violence" but it was rated R because there are same-sex kisses.
     
  8. Skipper

    Skipper Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    And while I can understand that the MPA rating can be an useful instrument for parents, I'm a little perplexed that can influence an adult's decision to watch or not a movie. I mean, The Exorcist and The King's Speech have the same rating! Perhaps, rather than rely on the judgment of someone we know nothing about and who has made very questionable choices in the past (and who we know is phobic about sex), it would be worthwhile to find out by reading reviews, hearing the opinions of friends who have seen the movie or even just see the trailers!
     
  9. fireproof78

    fireproof78 Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    I find that peers and friends viewing films is far more informational than a rating, or even most review sites.
     
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  10. crookeddy

    crookeddy Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    Eh my peers and friends have awful taste in movies!
     
  11. fireproof78

    fireproof78 Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    So do mine. But they at least no what I like better than random.internet.use.xx64
     
  12. TREK_GOD_1

    TREK_GOD_1 Vice Admiral Admiral

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    ..and to anyone who knows the full publishing and licensing history of Batman, they automatically reject the myth that the character was always marketed to kids, or that "embarrassment" notion. That is a propagandist's lie that should be dismissed, nothing more.
     
  13. thribs

    thribs Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Going back to the BvS Remastered discussion, I just checked the iTunes copy of the movie and they have indeed added the new IMAX 1.43:1 scenes to the movie. They weren’t there previously.
     
  14. Sci

    Sci Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    First off: This conversational hyper-fixation on the issue of the R rating is tangential to the larger point that I and my partner both made about the film: That has major structural problems, that it is thematically offensive, that its characterization is incoherent, and that fundamentally does not cohere as a film. This movie is less than the sum of its parts.

    I honestly don't agree. I don't consider any of the scenes I've read about from the extended cut to be vital. All they do is tell is plug some minor plot holes (that Luthor got an African woman to perjure herself before Congress, lined the new wheelchair he gave the anti-Superman guy with lead to hide the bomb, and briefly encountered Steppenwolf after Doomsday was defeated). None of these things were essential to the story.

    The actual problems, the cut scenes and alternate takes don't fix. The extended cut doesn't tell us what, for instance, Lex Luthor actually wanted out of his plans. It doesn't tell us why we should care about Bruce and Clark fighting since their conflict was a result of trickery and extortion and disappeared as soon as the word "Martha" was used. It doesn't fix the fact that the movie keeps going for almost an hour after the actual conflict of the film has been resolved and all that remains is punching. It doesn't change the fact that they stopped the plot to show us trailers of future movies. It doesn't solve the arbitrary creative choices (like Lois getting stuck in the well retrieving the spear she herself threw in there ten minutes earlier). It doesn't fix the fact that the whole thing feels, as my partner put it, someone took an "Ayn Rand Rewrites This Classic Story" parody for Superman but made it for real. It doesn't change the misogyny and toxic masculinity ingrained into the film from start to finish. It doesn't change the fact that the film uses the language of cinematic deconstructionism on Superman yet has nothing new or original to say about Superman, no hidden truth to reveal. It doesn't change the fact that this is a movie about a meaningless disagreement between two powerful men about how to exert violence upon faceless people in a meaningless, nihilistic world.

    100% agreed. He's very bad a structure.

    This video essay puts it well -- it's about moments vs. scenes.



    You got evidence to back that up? Some stats? How would you even measure such a thing?

    I would argue that some characters come with certain ideas inherent and essential to them, and that diverging too far from those elements causes them to reach a point where they are no longer meaningfully themselves anymore.

    Like you can do a version of Peter Pan where he goes through puberty, starts smoking, snorts cocaine, has unprotected sex with the mermaids, has his eye gouged out by Captain Hook, and then dies of syphilis. You could do that. But if you do, you're going to lose so many essential elements of the original story that your version of Peter Pan will not meaningfully bear any resemblance to the existing versions. It will for all practical purposes be an original character, and it will be quite frankly a perversion of what the existing character ought to be.

    Because while I agree that reinvention and reinterpretation are vital, I also argue that legacy characters ought to be certain things even as they evolve. And one of the things Batman and Superman ought to be, in addition to all the things we loved in, say, the Chris Nolan films or the DC Animated Universe, is, they ought to be something that children can watch. That doesn't mean that they can't be for adults, too. That doesn't mean they can't go to dark places. But they shouldn't be gorey, and they shouldn't be nihilistic, and they shouldn't be something an eight-year-old can't watch.

    And again, I think it's pretty damn gross to spend eighty years putting a character on kids lunch boxes and then turn around and do a major motion picture with that character but say it's for adults and children shouldn't watch it. It's a betrayal of the child audience, it's a perversion of one of the essential elements of the characters, and it's incredibly cynical because you know full well there will be a huge child audience no matter what you say. It's gross to make a movie you know kids can't handle that you also know massive numbers of them will watch.
     
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  15. fireproof78

    fireproof78 Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Completely disagree.
     
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  16. Saul

    Saul Vice Admiral Admiral

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    'Justice is Gray' is released tonight on HBO Max and there might be a few extras in the movie that weren't in the previous version. If you want to see this Universe continue then watch it. The views for the 4 hour version on the day of the premiere were double of WW84's.
     
  17. Timby

    Timby o yea just like that Administrator

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    I don't know, the world didn't stop spinning and we didn't all get flung into outer space from lack of gravity just because the ultra-violent, not-at-all-kid-friendly RoboCop 2 was made after a RoboCop cartoon, toy line and lunch boxes had been on shelves for a few years. (Yes, yes, I know, something something eighty years of history, don't come at me with that.)

    I guess I really just don't buy into the idea that there are immutable aspects of characters that can't be changed for any reason, and that to change them is "perversion." I don't think the longevity, or "legacy," of a character really determines how far one can and cannot go with adaptation / conversion / modification / what have you.

    I mean, okay, let's take Sherlock Holmes. At the core, Holmes is a drug-addicted narcissist who also happens to be a genius at solving crimes. If a new line of novels came around that had Holmes palling around with a former circus clown and a, I don't know, disc jockey who happened to work for K-RFT, MY-KROFT RADIO, MY RADIO, ALL THE TIME, and they spend their time solving mysteries in an MMORPG ... well, I'd raise an eyebrow, I'd probably say "what the fuck," I probably wouldn't give it the time of day unless I were really fucking high, but I certainly wouldn't begrudge it its existence, nor would I call it a cynical perversion or whatever. I'd just think, okay, it's A Thing that Exists and it's Not For Me. And I say that despite being a massive Sherlock Holmes fan, who rabidly consumes pretty much any content even tangentially related to the character.

    Ultimately, where I boil down to is that I don't think that all possible adaptations or takes on a character or property are good, but I do think that they're valid. I like Zack Snyder's take on Superman a hell of a lot more than I like Gough and Millar's on Smallville, but I don't argue that one is less worthy of existing than the other, and the pearl-clutching, both in its frequency and its intensity, is really quite ... well, simultaneously confusing and fascinating to me.
     
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  18. Guy Gardener

    Guy Gardener Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    I have never bothered to watch this, but I'm guessing they glossed over the cocaine addiction.



    On one hand Sherlock in the future might find a future without drugs, but he could just as easily find a future with better drugs, oh, I mean worse drugs.

    Although?

    What if it's a future without cocaine, and Sherlock Holmes reignites the industry?
     
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  19. Timby

    Timby o yea just like that Administrator

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    Oh, my God, I had totally forgotten that this existed.

    (And, yes, the last time I watched it cover-to-cover, I was really fucking high. :lol:)
     
  20. TREK_GOD_1

    TREK_GOD_1 Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Not to mention the Rambo cartoon for children, based on some of the most violent American films of the 20th century. Children were seen as a demographic to create a Rambo cartoon for because--oh, the faux horror--kids were seeing the Rambo movies and loved every minute of them. Few are the sheltered, incapable of handling fictional content flowers that reactionary, agenda-driven focus groups have spent 50+ years telling everyone were the norm and majority.

    Timby, what you have read is propaganda divorced from any experience reading Superman comics. Unlike certain people, I have read every Golden and Silver Age issue of Superman and Action Comics (the only way to truthfully and accurately comment on the source changed for better or worse), and know that in his early years, Superman not only killed villains outright, but would occasionally relish in the act, making harsh judgements about them. To understand the real history of the character, it requires reading, not using deviations that came decades later in the form of bad TV adaptations, movies & cartoons.

    As I've pointed out in earlier discussions, one also has to know American history to understand why it was not rare for early years Superman (and other comic and radio heroes) to be a violent character, and never had a moment of self-reflection about his actions. That is how the character was originally presented to an American culture pre-war / post-Prohibition era, one where vigilante justice was embraced by a sizable number of the population, instead of sending people racing to a psychiatrist's couch. Its utterly manipulative (and consciously ignorant of history) to post endless complaints that sell the one behind it as some sort of proponent of originalism, yet the original version of the debated subject is rejected. Early Superman was not George Reeves, the Hanna-Barbera Superman, the Alyn serials or even the Salkind's version, even though the Alyn serial and the Reeve interpretaton (in the 1st film) had some great moments for the character.

    So, some can choose to die on the hill of historical inaccuracy / agenda, but in posting endless rants about the Snyder Superman, it all turns into a case study of individuals arguing integrity to a creation, yet flushing said arguments down the toilet because they attempt to lift anything other than the way the creation was originally developed.

    Yep.